Tactical agility in the Obama campaign
People have heard me harp on John Boyd and the OODA-Loop (an acronym for a decision cycle in tactical conflicts). Tactical agility is something that is lacking in social movements, largely because we are mis-organized.
Here is a piece from CP by Chuck Spenney on Boyd and Obama’s campaign “ground game.” Two things we ought to try to understand, no? The tactically agile ground game, and at some point the campaign phenomenon achieved a tipping point, in the sense that Malcolm Gladwell defines it. Though Spinney’s article focuses on the tactical messaging decisions of the Obama campaign, there was a level of saturation with highly local campaign cadres who could themselves take decisions “agilely.” Some pundits were referring to the Obama campaign as “granular,” because everything about the campaign was targeted as locally as possible.
Obama’s OODA-Loop against McCain’s frontal assaults.
Because this race (and the current state of communications technology) blurred the aging distinctions between celebrity, mass movements, and political campaigns, how this happened needs our attention and study. We talk about the masses; and there they are… right inside that campaign. How?
The M & M Strategy
How Obama WonBy CHUCK SPINNEY
The M&M or Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy was conceived by the American strategist, Col. John R. Boyd. The basic goal of an M&M strategy is to build support for and attract the uncommitted to your cause by framing a “motherhood” position — i.e., a position no one can object to, like the mythical “motherhood, apple pie, and the American way” — and then inviting your opponent in to repeatedly attack it and, in so doing, smash himself to pieces at the mental and the even more decisive moral level of conflict. Self-destruction will happen inevitably, if you can successfully induce your adversary into attacking your motherhood position in a way that exposes mismatches among the three poles of his moral triangle, defined by (1) What your opponent says he is; (2) What he really is as defined by his actions; and (3) the World he has to deal with. Whether consciously or not, I believe Obama has an intuitive feel for the moral leverage inherent in the M&M strategy and this enabled him to outmaneuver McCain and his campaign and bring them to the verge of mental and moral collapse. That Obama also did this to Hillary Clinton suggests it is no…
Radical_Camera:
I definitely think there’s some value to the M&M strategy, but is that sort of thing really the cause of Obama’s win? Maybe to a small degree (of course any advantage is useful), but if, for instance, such a strategy could be masterfully executed by a Green candidate, or a candidate with views far left of center, how much would that actually help?
I think Obama’s victory is a complex intersection of factors, and can’t be pinned down to just his tactical moral framing of the issues. It seems to me that the “granular” character of his campaign had a far more influencial effect, with or without the use of an M&M strategy, but still in conjunction with a vast array of other factors. I think Spinney’s analysis gives too much credit to one attribute of the Obama campaign and concludes that voters were swayed to vote for Obama after observing discrepancies between McCain’s words and his actions, and that a similar end befell Hillary. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for some voters, but I’d hardly say it was the reason he won.
I think Boyd has a lot to teach us about tactical agility in social movements, and the M&M strategy is a good base to frame discussion, but to analyze the election in merely tactical terms feels like a limited approach, a search for cause and effect with no real way to measure the accuracy of our conclusions.
Who else has used the M&M strategy successfully? Who has used it and failed? Who has succeeded without using it?
6 November 2008, 4:36 amStan:
Democrats and Greens… apples, oranges. There are points at which simple change in quantity becomes a complex change in quality. The Democratic Party as an institution, has deep roots throughout the state and civil society, and is embedded by power in every social process. The Greens are a small, beginner organization, having never held power in any signficant way, and in fact just big enough to be a magnet for leftist and new-age sects, who repeatedly infect the organization with the auto-immune deficiency of sectarian wrangling over the proper way to state a position. They won’t even return phone calls or emails here.
Obama’s operation was within the Democratic Party, where he unseated the heir-apparent who was using old-style machine tactics; then in the GE, where the article points out the successful disorienting traps employed in messaging… but the “granular” ground game is even more interesting in this respect. Small, local cadres, once read in on the strategic imperatives of the campaign, were able to tailor and target, and quickly adapt tactics. I am quite sure there was extensive use made of mapping systems combined with databses to improve targeting and save time (saving time is one of the keys to staying inside the opponent’s decision-cycle),
No one would suggest — here, at least — that tactics alone won this campaign. Everything that has happened since we first showed up on this rock played its part, and there are dozens of variables that are more immediately available for study. But without the strategic vision and the tactical agility that this campaign demonstrated, it would not have prevailed with such force.
Cause-and-effect are the linear old-school preoccupation. Boyd was using complexity theory. CT assumes nothing is linear, even when it is determined. What makes tactical agility altogether non-controllable/predictable is that humans act as intentional and free agents.
The Obama campaign was a very contingent organization that lost its raison d’etre at 11 PM EST November 4th.
One reason De and I (and a few others) have stressed the importance of networks in the past is that networks are less authority- and rule-bound and more self-organizing. The larger an organization becomes, the more it is required to direct resources not ot its core mission, but to administration and management. These are authority-and-rule-bound phenomena. They lose tactical agility because the decision-making process is slow.
Dunbar’s number suggests that more than 150 people in a self-organized network exceeds the capacity of the individual homo sapien to effectively keep track of and deal intimately with others in the net (clan). If more than 150, or more than one clan are part of a networked network, then collective decision-making requires regulatory mechanisms to overcome this Dunbarian limitation. Presto chango, a formal staff. This is not a good or bad thing, just an apparent fact. Where it becomes a negative here — aside form the ossification of power — is in the context of strategic/tactical conflict.
If a large and necessarily bureaucratic organization needs greater tactical agility, then it must cede control over the day-to-day, decentralize its operations to the most local possible, and consciously avoid stifling initiative. This is not possible within many leftist sects mainly because the preoccupation is always with ideological purity — the idea being that the slightest deviation from whatever the present orthodoxy is could lead directly back to hell. So initiative within the organizations is completely stifled. The strategic analog to this is not networks of networks, but a bureacratic military-style organization, complete with mechanistic, linear “aim the main blow” strategic theories to match this organizational dynamic. The non-organic organizational structures themselves are determinative of their own possibilities and impossibilites. The preoccupations with ideological purity are one of those examples of talking like a philosophical materialist, but behaving like a philosophical idealist.
Obama’s campaign is over. How many of those networks, however, remain? And what are the practices (NOT the ideas!) that can shift the consciousness of those networks. I will suggest that a community garden does more to change understanding than a reading of The State and Revolution.
6 November 2008, 6:36 amStan Moore:
Very interesting analysis! And you might recall that I mentioned John Boyd (but not by name) recently and his ability to strategize inside the decision making process of other pilots in mock combat while in the Air Force.
But here is the problem I see — Obama was not only outmaneuvering John McCain, which was not difficult to do, since McCain is clearly a mental misfit.
Obama outmaneuvered the American people. That is the problem, which cannot be concealed over time. Spinney as much as said so when he said that the “motherhood” approach used by Obama was “an empty vessel”.
The Big Question is whether Obama will be able to outmaneuver the people while governing them. The Left Media put the Bush administration under intense scrutiny and did their best to reveal every distortion, every logical disconnect, every hypocrisy. The Right Media will do this with Obama, but the question is whether at some point the Left Media will evaluate public interest during an Obama administration as opposed to Democratic Party interest and then begin to fight for the people by revealing Obama maneuvering and countering it with truth over deception.
If Spinney can evaluate Obama’s OODA maneuvers in the election process, it should be possible to similarly evaluate governance and that is what will be needed moving forward.
I thought it was interesting to hear commentaries on National Public Radio correctly revealing that Obama is NOT a person of the Left. He was described post-election as a “pragmatic centrist”. This hardly reassures us that Obama will be an agent of the sort of change his voters expect. How will the people respond when the maneuvers are more obvious to them?
Stan Moore
6 November 2008, 7:52 amPetaluma, CA
BrianR:
Have you read Zack Exley’s post The New Organizers, Part 1: What’s really behind Obama’s ground game?
6 November 2008, 10:11 amStan Moore:
With regard to tactics in an election process, I think it is fair to say that tactics alone cannot result in a win, but they can result in a loss. I would go farther and say that John McCain could have won on his record, but tactical ineptness was a major factor in his loss. Of course, John McCain, as a naval aviator, is said to have crashed no less than seven warplanes in his military career, which may be relevant.
Stan Moore
6 November 2008, 12:55 pmPetaluma, CA
charles:
Obama’s campaign is over. How many of those networks, however, remain? And what are the practices (NOT the ideas!) that can shift the consciousness of those networks. I will suggest that a community garden does more to change understanding than a reading of The State and Revolution.
^^^
Read ( and whistle) while we work.
The author of _The State and Revolution_ emphasized _unity_ of theory and practice, practical-critical activity; and he proved very much his theories in practice ( and his theories _of_ practice)
6 November 2008, 1:10 pmHarris Pohl:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/468.html
6 November 2008, 11:12 pmRadical_Camera:
Stan,
Thanks for the analysis. Very illuminating. I guess what I was trying to say in my original comment was that using the OODA loop and Boyd as tools to analyze efficient and tactically agile organization just seemed to jump out at me as being very important, while the M&M strategy didn’t seem to resonate with me so much, though it was basically the main focus of the Spinney’s article. I guess I found your analysis more useful than Spinney’s. Go figure.
One question though. You said, “CT assumes nothing is linear, even when it is determined.” I’ve read quite a bit of Boyd (most of his Powerpoint presentations and a biography), but I don’t think I’m too clear on this concept, and perhaps unclear on CT in general. Are there any resources that you can recommend that might explain how even when something is determined it still isn’t linear?
8 November 2008, 6:32 amStan:
Complexity/chaos theory
Ilya Prigogine
Fuzzy Logic
God plays dice with the universe; but the dice are loaded.
Unpredictability is not just a limitation of the observer who doesn’t have enough information. Bifircation, randomness is part of the physical universe. It is contained within order, but the order is dynamic.
What Boyd did, in a very definite field (aerial tactical conflict), was show that one can make an ally of the unpredictability (chaos). But you can’t do that if you continue to harbor the illusion of predictabilty (as almost all organizations inherently do). Nassim Taleb has created a kind of taxonomy related to the predictables and unpredictables we encounter.
8 November 2008, 5:24 pmStan:
A great Taleb quote:
8 November 2008, 9:09 pmCrowings:
Perfect Balance is constant movement.
8 November 2008, 11:55 pmStan Moore:
Are you saying that Barack Obama is a Black Swan?
It seems to me that Taleb made a great analysis of risk in financial markets when he understood that complex mathematical algorithms can confuse and amplify misunderstanding of risk, thereby increasing it. Thus his career prevailed over those who jettisoned caution in exhange for short-term exhorbitant profit.
Yet, it seems to me that Taleb turned around and forgot his own lessons when he declared that the securities crisis was an unpredictable Black Swan. James Howard Kunstler saw that Black Swan months before Taleb started talking about it and seemed to have an excruciating time waiting for its arrival , which is still ongoing and evolving.
On the other hand, in connecting to nature and ecology, one of the real complexities that is very difficult and rare to document and to predict is the dynamic of cascading effects and tipping points. For instance, to this very day the long-term vegetative effects of livestock grazing on arid ecosystems is a controversial matter, and especially where financial interests are involved. The Society for Range Management provides “scientific” evidence that cattle are good for some environments, and Allan Savory preaches intensive grazing as a healing method for “brittle” habitats. On other other hand, the legendary conservationist and ecologist Aldo Leopold said that in arid environments, all grazing tends to be overgrazing and that much of the healing of land could only occur in geological time frames. The Society for Conservation Biology, another scientific group, has internal debates over what the “facts” portray. In short, when viewing nature it seems that even trained scientists tend to see what they want to see and are capable of arguing and disagreeing vehemently on what they saw long after the fact.
In view of all of this, it seems that mankind’s fate in large depends on principles of motivation and organization. It seems like greed is a major unifier of those who organize to perpetuate their own self-interest, and can do so with great effect in limited numbers. Those of us burdened with principle and especially with varying perspectives of what is and what needs to be have great difficulty in attaining the necessary leverage to accomplish our goals, though we are by far in the overall majority. Democracy itself keeps getting perverted into a mechanism for social control by the elite and I think we are getting closer and closer to a breaking point where the masses will either have to achieve just power or the species will self-destruct significantly. We are running out of room to maneuver…
Stan Moore
9 November 2008, 12:58 amPetaluma, CA
Stan:
Not at all. Black Swans are events that screw up the system, change the direction of events, when something atypical — but with tremendous impact — happens. 9-11, eg.
Barack Obama’s campaign was only a Black Swan for Hillary Clinton. What Obama’s campaign did was recognize that there are untapped potentialities in communications technology and its applications (MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, et al); then they started working them. The first thing this paid off with (pun intended) is money… money that flowed like water. The old insider fundraising that the Clintons relied on plodded along like a great and formidable beast… while the Obama database went exponential — and off grid. By campaign’s end, they had over 2 million people they could go to and say, “Hey, Obama’s campaign needs $20.” At some point, a tipping point was reached, whereupon the old-guarders began abandoning the USS Hillary. The disarray of the Repubican Party is not a Black Swan either. McCain just emerged as the one foolish enough to be the Republican candidate in the wake of 8 years of ideologically-driven ineptitude by the Bush cohort. By then, the Obama campaign — skilled by its tactically agile contest with Clinton — had developed a vast network of granular redundancy, that was picking up votes and knocking down intiatives by McCain’s organization. Obama may very well have still beaten McCain using the old, bureacratic, “main blow” tactics; but Obama would never have received the nomination in this case. Clinton would have. As it turned out, the development of the actual Obama campaign — in the wake of the primaries — had created a massive sponge that could soak up whatever it came into contact with. Ergo, the lopsided victory of Obama over McCain. They should send Clinton a thank-you note.
Taleb’s taxonomy of events (he hasn’t called it that, I am) includes a parallel taxonomy of fallacies. He was a trader, because he wanted to accumulate what he calls “fuck-you money,” so he could pursue his real interests (philosophy-science-even religion [he is Greek Orthodox]), without being an academic (he has issues with pretentious authority). He is friends with chaotician Mandelbrot, and he is merciless in skewering empiricism. He is in fact a feral scholar… a good one, imho. In his notebook on opacity, he has some great quotes.
“Be Inefficient, Increase Redundancy, Beware Optimizers.”
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“Mathematics is often there to lecture birds how to fly.”
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“For bildungphilisters [one of Taleb's terms] (financial economists & other), empiricism is looking at data and formulating opinions congruent with the data (using a mental disease commonly called statistical methods). Wrong. The true meaning of empiricism is the avoidance of inductive generalizations outside the instances in which a given observation was made: you cannot extend the properties too aggressively outside the sample set of observation, particularly when you encounter slight dissimilarities. So an empirical doctor would focus on the extremely similar. History can only repeat itself in the exact circumstances of prior occurrences. It also implies the avoidance of top down theorization, ideas about how things should be in order to fit the presumed mind of nature (Aristotelian’ final causes, Galen’s natural purpose of an organ, today notions of “equilibrium”, naïve evolutionary theorists etc.). [This explains why some cannot understand why I can be skeptical and empirical at the same time].”
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“Nobody seems to notice that over the millennia religions (all religions) have saved people from death –because it protected them from doctors and ‘science’. Because of the illusion of control, we feel like ‘doing something’ when facing a problem –’seeing an expert’, etc. If religion is at least neutral then it is a great way to stay out of harms’ way: science, faux-experts, quacks, etc.”
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“The anthropologist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Dan Sperber has proposed the following idea on the epidemiology of representations. What people call ‘memes,’ ideas that spread and that compete with one another using people as carriers, are not truly like genes. Ideas spread because, alas, they have for carriers self-serving agents who are interested in them, and interested in distorting them in the replication process. You do not make a cake for the sake of merely replicating a recipe—you try to make your own cake, using ideas from others to improve it. We humans are not photocopiers.
The idea of Sperber (counter the ideas of Blackmore, Dawkins, and other people who wrote on this before him) is that memes don’t resemble genes. The comparison is naive, too naive –one of those naive analogies. Culture has no DNA; it does not replicate mechanically like genes –errors in replication are neither independent nor random: they are, I repeat, self-serving; self-serving! ”
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And Taleb’s list of “cognitive biases” (the taxonomy of falacy) is well worth a look.
The “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” is one of my faves: (from Wiki)”The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy in which information that has no relationship is interpreted or manipulated until it appears to have meaning. The name comes from a story about a Texan who fires several shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.”
There is no illusion more compelling, it seems, than the illusion of control.
Another interesting theorist is Paul Virilio, who says war has driven technological innovation far more directly than the exigencies of capital accumulation; and who coined the term dromology with regard to the appropriation of time (speed). This deepens the notion Hornborg touches on about accumulation being ultimately the expropriation of time and space. He says, “War was my university.” I identify. He sounds like Illich on the topic of iatrogenesis and technology.
9 November 2008, 8:27 amStan Moore:
I probably should have put a smiley face on my question about Obama being a Black Swan with the emphasis being on the colorizing adjective. I agree with the description of Obama’s tactical success over Hillary, but am not sure that it fits the “Black Swan” category per Taleb because Obama did not innovate new and unpredictable methods. Instead, he expanded the use of generational technology that others had begun in prior elections, such as Howard Dean and which others, including Dr. Libertarian (Ron Paul, albeit in the context of a much smaller pool of excitable ecstatic supporters. Those supporters had heard similar rhetoric to Obama’s from other politicians of the same political party, but had not been galvanized by the symbol of skin pigmentation and youthful generational demeanor and they quickly massed as a large army. Obama gathered a huge flock of brand new white swans and put them to work as I see it.
I heard Taleb interviewed on the radio and thought he was great and went and bought his book “Fooled by Randomness”.
It seems to be that Taleb (taking note of the quotations by Stan G. above) is perceptive, but not perfect in his assessment of science and statistics. Science and statistics are human endeavors representing structure of thought and analysis. Both can be done well and both can be done poorly. Wildlife Biologists David Anderson, Gary White and Kenneth Burhnam of Colorado State University are proponents of a form of stastistical inference that is gaining ground in biological research because it seeks to parse out the irrelevant and the unproductive and misleading information in data samples and in analysis algorithms that distort accurate analysis. These statisticians say outright that if the field sampling in a study of tagged bobwhite quail is not accomplished with appropriate rigor (including real randomness) then the analysis will be flawed and nothing in their methodology can correct those fundamental problems.
I think Taleb is saying something similar. All the computational power in the world’s greatest computers and most complex mathematics does not turn garbage data into good analysis. Power of mind does not turn straw into gold, but if used properly can find gold hidden in straw.
Regarding war, while I do not advocate war as a means for human conflict resolution, I do see high value in observing practicioners of war. War can be is an ultimate context and contest for problem solving because the stakes are so high.
A great general officer or sergeant is a problem solver in real time and a planner, logistician, and psychologist.
I am fascinated by problem solving and so I find myself learning about warfare to some extent for that purpose alone. And one interesting aspect of problem solving in war is that small forces can prevail against large forces, in part because the psychology of some warriors is simply not to accept defeat — no matter what. Chesty Puller was one of those guys who would not be defeated by the Koreans, the Chinese or the cold, but he did have a much harder time in later life negotiating the government bureacracy because the rules were different.
Stan Moore
9 November 2008, 11:34 amPetaluma, CA
Jonathan:
Stan: “What Boyd did, in a very definite field (aerial tactical conflict), was show that one can make an ally of the unpredictability (chaos)”
Something that I think needs emphasis, which Stan has pointed out elsewhere in similar discussions, is that it is not only recognizing unpredictability in your own position (ie not relying on a burdensome bureaucratic network) but also in using your opponent’s *misunderstanding* or ignorance of the effects of complexity in their position to your advantage.
(Using an admittedly lacking metaphor of fencing: recognizing an “aim the main blow” tactician, feigning an opening that would seem to give the coup de grace, predicting the likely orientation and imbalance of such and attempt and using the outcome of such and attempt (or not!) to inform your next move – all the while never losing or relinquishing your own balance)
Socrates was particularly adept at using this strategy in a philosophical discussion, Taleb used this strategy in the markets to make his ‘fuck you money’.
I’m interested to hear specific examples of how this has been used or could be used in the context Stan has set out, if I got it right – mass social change. The Motherhood strategy in the context of political campaigns (or tactic? or both?) seems a smaller, more specific pattern of this strategy – what else works?
The martial metaphors though useful, are simplistic in understanding “the opposition” in this context (a notion with a definite potential for cognitive bias) – though something is definitely being opposed…. a kind of perverted linear patterning of society…
Times up! I’ll have to leave on a vague note… thanks all for the fascinating discussion!
10 November 2008, 12:33 am(Boer) Tom:
Sorry, I’m not based in USA, nor am I involved in party-based political campaigns, so the following is somewhat obscure to me:
“By then, the Obama campaign — skilled by its tactically agile contest with Clinton — had developed a vast network of granular redundancy, that was picking up votes and knocking down initiatives by McCain’s organization.”
Could you give 2-3 examples to motivate? In these campaigns, what constitutes an initiative?
10 November 2008, 5:00 amStan:
Don’t want to bog this down in detailed tactical vocabs; I just want to understand what was new on the scene with this campaign. I got an email from one reader who was a little irritated with my own personal coinages, ie, “granular redundancy.” He asked for a citation; but since I just made it up, the only citation I have is the comment in which the phrase appeared.
Granular had been used previously to describe the decentralization of the campaign teams and their mandate to fit the appeals to local populations. Redundancy is an aspect of decentralization of operations (in any arena) wherein the losses and setbacks of one element does not send destructive ripples all the way back through the organization. I would advocate granular redundancy for “homeland security”, through relocalization… having critical infrastructural facilities that span large spaces provides would-be attackers a point target that looks good on something called a CARVER target analysis formula (criticality, accessibility, recuperability, vulnerability, effect on population, and reaction time). When we had the massive electrical blackout a couple years ago, that was a hint. Smaller, local, redundant facilities are still vulnerable to one degree or another; but they do not qualify as “strategic” targets (like, say, a financial, military, and political nerve center [9-11]). Imposing micromanaging chains of command at some center not only slows the OODA decision cycle down (rule by committee), it creates a “strategic” center. Strategic here means key to winning the big war (so to speak), whereas tactical refers to means for winning individual engagements. (The operational realm is associated with the ocnduct of campaigns, which connect strategy to tactics.) It all depends on intelligence — or organized, synthetic information (which we don’t know about in the Obama campaign yet); as an example, the US attempted the first “decapitation strike” [a strategic goal with the intent of eliminating the necessity for longer campaigns] in Iraq against a building where they thought Saddam was. (1) He wasn’t there; and (2) their bombs strayed a few feet and slaughtered a bunch of civilians (beginning the downward spiral in relations between occupier and occupied).
“Initiative” is the ultimate intangible in contests. It resides with one opponent or the other, at the expense of the latter. A zero-sum game. If you initatiate an action that forces your opponent to change his planned course of action, s/he has lost the “initiative.” Once lost, if the contestant with the intiative exploits that intiative faster than the other contestant can react effectively, then the lost-initiative contestant spins into a series of ever more “mismatched” (Boyd’s term, menaing mismatches between reality and action) and confused decisions. Think here of a person in the woods who is beseiged by a swarm of yellow jackets. S/he will flail and run around aimlessly in a panic. That person’s decision-cycle has been overwhelmed. The “agility” is composed of two elements: (1) a repertoire of well-learned techniques (the bag of tricks, or Felix the Cat aspect) and (2) attention to changes wrought in one’s opponent by the execution of one’s own last action. Atheletes understand this intuitively. One observes the situation (here is where good intelligence/understanding is critical), orients on the vulnerabilities of one’s opponent, decides on a course of action, then acts. At precisely this instant (completion of action), one then has to drop all assumptions (here is where we make an ally, not an enemy of unpredictability) and roll back into the Observe-mode. Because your action just changed the situaiton; but you cannot predict how, because your conscious opponent is not an aspect of the situation that you can control. The object of this exercise is to disorient the opponent and force them into rash action. You seize and maintain the initiative.
The Obama drive into “enemy territory” actually pulled McCain’s campaign away from the “battlegrounds.”
On Stan’s point (thanks for the thoughtful response, btw), it was not the newness or unpredictability of the methods (phone banks, ads, canvassing, et al — Felix the Cat stuff) that gave the campaign a Black Swan aspect from the point of view of Clinton and McCain, but the atypical organization (granularity, redundancy, and yes… employment of well-known communications technologies within a unique organizational model).
I’ve been thinking for quite some time about organizations, which all of us have the tendency to fetishize… we pretend that we can divorce tactics and methods from the actual structures of the organizations. But the structure determines what is and is not possible, because it has three inescapable and inherent properties: (1) capacity, (2) speed of decision-making, and (3) spatial impact.
A good example is labor unions, that still do things the old way even when structured finance has changed the “boss’s” whol orientation to the process. When the “owner” is a vast holding company, with one enterprise a mere line in their portfolio — and the bottom-line criterion is not production, but share price — when the employees of that company begin discussing unions and strikes and the like, the holding complany has no interest in bargaining. They just redline that enterpise in the portfolio. The temporal aspect of financialization (hot money) has obscolesced the olde-tyme union organization… that dodders on using archaic tactics and archaic bureaucracies, and losing, losing, losing. Look at the reduction of union density in the US and compare it to the removal of finanicial pole repression inherited from the New Deal.
10 November 2008, 5:58 amStan Moore:
Keep talking Stan Goff! You give my neurons a very healthy workout while introducing original lingo and precise analysis.
I did not follow Obama’s campaign closely enough to understand all the use of technology and tactics at the operational level of retail politics. And it offers more hope than I would have had otherwise in knowing that the electorate may be able to use that two-way relationship which is fundamental to any relationship to leverage democracy back onto the lap of Obama. Obama used the supporters to get what he wanted and in so doing formed a tactical organization of relationships and operators. The process must be used in reverse for the supporters to get what they want from Obama while maintaining that relationship.
The question is the real sincerity of Obama. Will his rhetoric during the election process reflect his real self? Or will he turn into “O-Bomb-A” and increase wars for corporate profit? Can he be influenced away from one source of his power by another and, in so doing, allow democracy to work its way upwards from the grass roots?
Obviously, in cosmic terms this should be possible, but the dynamics of power play by rules that try and often do treat democracy like a hive of wasps to be sprayed and killed before too much damage is done to the status quo. So democracy has to create offensive AND defensive tactics to survive and analysts like Stan Goff have much to teach us, in my opinion.
Stan Moore
10 November 2008, 11:26 amPetaluma, CA
Stan:
A bit too generous… and I’m a pacifist (I want that clear). (:
I just want to kick up a conversation. The real practical knowledge resides “out there.” The thing I’d most want to understand about Obama is where are his boundaries and limitations. We have this idea that the presidency is this all-powerful thing; but we have just seen what happens. The ruling class knows now what it gets into when they let idiots hijack the government and use that power like a 6-year-old who just found an RPG. This will be a consultative presidency; and we are already getting the lay of the consulting land. But past is not prologue. The geopolitical and economic circumstances that shaped the neoliberal cohort of Obama have changed. Neoliberalism won’t be reinstated, because it can’t. That is the system that just crashed. Humpty dumpty.
And though the powers currently have the government making massive payouts (to the rich) to prevent a social collapse (and upheaval), those don’t look likely to work either. Neither ideology nor ethics nor advisors are going to determine what the executive does. The conditions will dictate; and do so with an iron fist. That’s one reason Guantanamo is important. How he handles Guantanamo is going to tell us a great deal about whether Obama will embrace reaction when the shit hits the fan. If he veers away from the security state, that means some breathing space for (often spontaneous) democratic processes to take root.
They are running a trillion dollar deficit with a losing two-front war; and the dollar is about to have the wax melted off its wings. These Clintons can’t choreograph the fictional value orgy of the 90s.
10 November 2008, 2:55 pmJames M:
Obama Plans Guantanamo Close, US Trials
I intend to maintain a deliberate neutrality on Obama, for at least the near future. I am, however, increasingly heartened about environmental issues under his tenure, so far specifically the talk of him revoking drilling rights in Utah and the speculation about him possibly appointing RFK, Jr. as EPA head — a guy who I’m confident will reverse the trend of behaving in that capacity as a corporate sycophant with a sinecurial post.
10 November 2008, 4:55 pmStan Moore:
Since the American people are just about to suffer the consequences of hostile economic attack by the American government, I think Obama ought to go down and get some helpful guidance from a proven survivor of such. He ought to sneak into Cuba for a week of visitation with Uncle Fidel and learn how the people can survive embargoes and economic warfare and let the American people benefit from that knowledge.
Of course, he would have to keep it hush hush.
anonymous
10 November 2008, 5:40 pmcharles:
I’d say Obama is a Black Swan in Nassim Taleb’ sense
10 November 2008, 5:42 pmCraig:
“I’d say Obama is a Black Swan in Nassim Taleb’ sense.”
I don’t. Obama was already a known quantity in 2004, and the question that most interests me is what differences there are between Barack Obama in 2008 and Howard Dean in 2004. A lot of what is written here applies to Dean’s candidacy as well.
“Smaller, local, redundant facilities are still vulnerable to one degree or another; but they do not qualify as “strategic” targets (like, say, a financial, military, and political nerve center [9-11]).”
Relocalization, as described on this site, is a worthwhile enough idea to not require a craven appeal to fears of terrorism.
11 November 2008, 1:55 pmStan:
craven… wow
The problem is that the fact that fear of terrorism is used as a political wedge does not make violence unreal. The paradox and the hope of relocalization vs same-old is that the delocalized system we are now in breeds violence; and to tell others that no threat of violence exists is as dishonest as those who represent it as constantly outside the door. Policy is epiphenomenal. The existence of the core-periphery relationship in the world — a delocalized and delocalizing world — is inherently violent, and it inevitably brings violent reaction to itself. Terrorism is a polemical device that is materially self-fulfilling. 9-11 did happen. I saw it about one million times on tv. The pertinence of it in this context, however, aside from this digression to respond to being “craven,” is that 9-11 worked. It judoed the US into a two-front war in southwest Asia that is proving very difficult to abandon.
The surprise for bin Laden (a Saudi political intriguer) is that it has led to the meteoric rise of Iranian influence. (argh… so much for being “effective.”)
People want to know about their security. Ideological avoidance of this concern doesn’t make it go away; though it could make the ideologue irrelevant in the polis at large. (No big deal, I guess, since the delocalized, compartmentalized polis has lost any ability to direct itself anyway. Obama is not in charge now; and won’t be in the future. He just tagged in to take the tiger’s tail from George W. Bush.)
On the Dean-Obama issue… there is a big obvious difference. Obama won. So there must be some other more detailed differences as well. I concede at the outset that Obama never pissed off the DLC like Dean did (even though they awarded him a pretty big consolation prize to calm his supporters). But I tend to reject unilinear explanations. One big difference as well was that Dean never mobilized Black voters like Obama did (which Obama hadn’t until Clinton exposed herself to the Obama campaign in South Carolina by making that idiotic remark about the Civil Rights Act… precisely the kind of tactical opening that can be used to wrong-foot a campaign; and Clinton never regained the initiative after that, because she had to switch to ever more ad hoc and coded appeals to “whiteness”). But I also tend to reject bilinear explanations.
Honestly, and just speaking for myself, I’m not all that interested in being effective any more. My curiosity on this point has to do with curiosity about predictability (and efficiency, and progress, et al) in general. I certainly don’t put any faith in the state or its functionaries to solve anything. They’re generally more clueless than we are; and once we get state power, we become equally clueless. I’m an apocalypticist at heart. Relocalizaton is just a way of saying that the arrow between practice and thought goes from practice to thought; and you can’t choose your practice when a delocalized social grid (and technical specialization) strips communities of the capacity or basic skills to survive. (That’s why state socialism was such an abject catastrophe… it hyper-centralized decision-making and shared capitalist optimism about “developmental progress”.) Relocalization is a revelatory practice; and revelation is stifled by management and specialization. I’ll leave off for another thread (since it is not a shared assumption) the theological aspect of practice that “reveals,” but refusal to be an enemy is a key part of that.
11 November 2008, 3:05 pmCraig:
“craven… wow”
My apologies. I didn’t intend to offend.
Terrorism is not merely a political wedge; it is the political wedge of the last several years, and its goal is the exact opposite of relocalization, namely more centralized control, and the average person makes this choice when confronted with terrorism every time. In short, if terrorism is an issue, relocalization is out of the question. Even if terrorism is a theoretical concern, on a practical level it is far down the list, especially now that has been supplanted by the poor economy. By putting it forth as an argument, you’re giving it way too much credence and undermining your own argument.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I can explain the global credit crisis, and I’m always at a loss. When I talk to one of my parents, I’m talking to someone who’s counting on their 401(K) to support them through retirement, and so the person already has a reason to cheer on the stock market, even if they don’t realize how they’re being blackmailed into supporting the global financial system to their long term detriment. The response is always the same; more government power to deal with the crisis. Bigger bailouts, more bridge loans, looser monetary policy, even the government possibly insuring the stock market like the FDIC. Fear fertilizes centralization in all forms.
I don’t think you can assume that the “state and its functionaries” will fail, or at least that the failure will be total. The medium of this discourse is a product of the Pentagon, for example. There are no absolutes. There is, however, an argument for relocalization that is not an argument against centralization.
I mentioned Howard Dean because, to be frank, I think Obama’s campaign was less exceptional than it has been portrayed. What if Howard Dean ran in 2008 instead of Obama? Would he have won, and won in pretty much the same way? Maybe, maybe not. However, the 50-state aspect, the web as a money machine, all come from Dean’s 2004 run (and his being the head of the DNC). Mostly, however, the circumstances are different. After Lehman Brothers went out of business, McCain had no chance. The retail sector is imploding to the point that Circuit City goes out of business right before the holiday season, the housing market is in a free fall now even in holdouts such as Seattle and Portland, and McCain’s economic advisor is a man who said the U.S. is “a nation of whiners.” A Republican aspiring to run for office someday told me he thought the Republicans only had a chance with Mitt Romney because the election was going to be decided by the economy. I’m not convinced Romney would have won, even if he would have been a better candidate. In tough economic times, people tend to vote Democratic.
11 November 2008, 7:21 pmStan:
Actually, I am saying the opposite.
Studied from the point of view of a serious security analyst (and not someone who is promoting a bureaucratic, economic, or population control agenda), relocalization is the absolute best anti-terrorism strategy. We had the most expensive and lethal military in the world; and that didn’t stop 9-11. It is the criticality of the target (speaking as a hypothetical security analyst) that is attractive, and centralized critical infrastructure is characteristic of delocalization.
Ten thousand small electrical generation facilities — each serving a small area — are ten thousand times as hard to get at as one big one. 100,000 banks… or the world trade center. If I am the hypothetical planner, again, I look at the CARVER formula (above).
We don’t need to avoid the issue of security. In fact, we can’t. It’s always on people’s minds. We need to educate people on the realities of security. Reality (1): If you don’t provoke conventionally weaker actors with your policies, they won’t conduct asymmetric attacks. Reality (2): “Granular redundancy” (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) distributes and minimizes the risk of any strike (or accident, for that matter).
The US is failing in Iraq and Afghanistan because there is no conquered state, no locus of measurable victory. In both countries, the state was erased, leaving the US occupations without a singular effective strategic target (like the surrender of Germany or Japan). That’s why Scowcroft warned them they’d need a half million just to occupy Iraq. Instead, they are now entrapped in (to them) inexplicable and shifting social networks with multiple militias.
Capacity for vengeance is not security. It’s masculinity and fear and some other stuff; but it’s not security.
Here is the true secret of security… one word. Peace.
11 November 2008, 8:44 pmStan Moore:
I think Howard Dean had great tactics but an unappealing personality and thus pulled defeat from the jaws of possible victory. What made Obama’s ascent so amazing to me was the fact that Hillary Clinton was expected by the Democrat hierarchy and no doubt by herself to take the nomination in a cakewalk and the presidency with ease in the aftermath of the Bush legacy. What Bush did to his party was not unlike what Bill Clinton did to his party a few years earlier — create massive distaste that mobilized the opposition. One way or another, a Democrat was very likely to get elected this time around. Obama smelled an opportunity and jumped on it and Hillary was not able to benefit from all the groundwork she had laid for a big war against the Republicans. I was actually amazed at how well McCain actually did, and I was surprised the popular vote was as close as it was. The popular vote tells me that Obama will have lots of political opposition all the way and that any missteps or bad luck due to circumstances beyond his control (and most circumstances WILL be beyond his control) will be used against him. And the Republicans will be a much more organized and effective opposition party than the Democrats have been.
The entire Republican cadre of candidates this year was a joke, which also was surprising. Fred Thompson/pathetic, Rudolph Guiliani/weak, even Mitt Romney had the sincerity and charisma of a green fart. There was nothing for Republican voters to grasp onto, and I thought it was amazing that a brainless moose hunter mom from Alaska could get so many people excited on the Right. That in and of itself was/is scary!
I sort of think that Obama hit a big tailwind when Caroline Kennedy came out and endorsed him as a transformational figure. Somehow that seemed to catalyze a move by an increasing number of Big Names on the left to switch from Hillary to Obama and made him increasingly look more like a statesman and less and less like J.J. from Good Times.
If you buy the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, which I take as 99.9% certain based on many, many streams of evidence, then the entire war on terrorism puts in place a completely different mindset in its relevance to Peak Oil, late stage capitalism, and the plunder of what’s left by the global elite. That is one reason I am highly disappointed that Noam Chomsky failed to do his own investigation of official discrepencies and verifiable nonsense of the official story and instead he shrugged off the “conspiracy theorists”. I told him by email of my disappointment and think I probably pissed him off in so doing, based on the little bit of feedback I received from him. I am not saying we know all the details of how the inside job worked, but we know that much of what we were told is false and we know that the Project for the New American Century called for a new Pearl Harbor – like attack on America to catalyze America’s militaristic adventurism and imperial strategy for world hegemony.
By the way, I saw on another website a long transcript of USMC Major General Smedley Butler’s speech “War is a Racket”, which is well worth reviewing. I will see if I can get a link for those interested…
Stan Moore
12 November 2008, 1:10 amPetaluma, CA
Stan Moore:
Major General Smedley Butler (long speech) “War is a Racket”:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
Stan Moore
12 November 2008, 1:15 amPetaluma, CA
Craig:
“Studied from the point of view of a serious security analyst (and not someone who is promoting a bureaucratic, economic, or population control agenda), relocalization is the absolute best anti-terrorism strategy. We had the most expensive and lethal military in the world; and that didn’t stop 9-11.”
This is a difference between strategy and tactics, and terrorism as a political issue is more about tactics. Tactically, if you want to stop terrorism, you put up barricades and video cameras. Strategically, you don’t bomb other people’s delocalized infrastructure. Also, the U.S. military was never oriented toward defense, labels notwithstanding, unless you mean defense of military Keynesianism in the home district. It’s true that a competent military probably couldn’t have stopped the planes smashing into the WTC, but the Pentagon?
The danger with the electrical grid or the banking system isn’t from terrorists, but from more garden variety screw-ups. Delocalized banks led to bad economic decisions, which led to no money down option ARM’s at the peak of a housing bubble. Even further, U.S. economic policy has hidden its failure for decades by pushing the consequences onto the periphery (Detroit, West Virginia, etc.), leading to Wile E. Coyote running himself off a cliff before he realizes it.
“I think Howard Dean had great tactics but an unappealing personality…”
AKA, the Dean scream.
“If you buy the idea that 9/11 was an inside job..”
I don’t, and I wish this idea would go away.
12 November 2008, 7:49 amShaukat:
I don’t want to sidetrack the discussion, but in response to the claim that 9/11 was an inside job, the best article I’ve read debunking this idea is by Diana Johnstone, and can be found here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone09152006.html
12 November 2008, 9:25 amStan Moore:
Smedley Butler Society (anti-war, imperialism, etc.)
I just discovered the existence of this organization, whose website is at http://www.warisaracket.org
There is a ton of useful and historic information on that website, including stuff on the imperial nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how profit is generated from such wars, and how to put a stop to it.
One page of note is: http://www.warisaracket.org/helmet.html
Notice the peace sign on the helmet of the American soldier in Iraq and below is the highly satirical “War Prayer” by Mark Twain, who was quite a remarkable anti-imperialism crusader in his time, which overlapped substantially with Smedley Butler’s heyday. Read that soldier’s satirical prayer and contrast with reformed soldier Stan Goff’s advice to U.S. military stationed in Middle East war zones.
On a personal note: the last couple of years I have made a number of trips to Southern California to do field work on raptors. As a small part of this work, I have been on Camp Pendleton during wartime and it is sobering to just be in that area where military training takes place Big Time. Looking for raptor nests my partner and I came across hidden armed National Guard troops amongst the bushes, hidden from view. Overhead one could see flights of multiple helicopters doing military training. Many areas of the base are excluded due to safety reasons, and biologists working in the open land areas must coordinate all movements and report their physical locations to camp headquarters continually or be excluded from the base. Seeing this all firsthand as a civilian was sobering as hell. I had ideas of trapping and banding a lot of raptors on Camp Pendleton and they are abundant there in the wild areas. But wartime restrictions on movements make it almost impossible to do so now, though it is possible for permittee biologists to monitor nests and band young raptors with some administrative and logistical difficulty. The historic photos of Smedley Butler in San Diego County reminded me of this…
Stan Moore
12 November 2008, 10:58 amPetaluma, CA
charles:
Cuba has a good model for locally organized block by block neighborhood defense. They had no choice given the threat from the US.
Who was it who directed us to the concept of “an armed organization of the population” as he worked in his “garden” ?
I think a key freshness and promise of the Obama campaign was the much talked about heavy role of younger people. Just as the youth of my youth had better politics than our parents, a fresh generation with better politics has arrived ! Hurray ! Yes we can change the world.
I was in an Obama “squad” on the near eastside of Detroit. I would say that the campaign was organized with centers, and hierarchy. Our Field Organizer was a 22 year old recent grad of Univ of Mich. in political science, getting a little practice. Our cells were not autonomous, but we were volunteers, which carries inherent independence. We volunteered to follow orders.
We will be trying to carry on some of the networking we did with each other for future political work. The Republicans were laughing at O being a Community Organizer. hahaha. We who laugh last , laugh last.
12 November 2008, 6:50 pmStan:
Triumphalism in humiliation of an “enemy,” and following orders are not being the change we believe in. It’s revenge and the self-same discipline as the all-volunteer army.
Surely among these networks of Obama supporters, there will be some who are willing to hold Obama accountable. So far, he has reneged on his opposition to the war, supported the bailout of the rich, rattled military sabers at Afghanistan and Pakistan, declared for “free trade” agreements, declared against equal rights for gay and lesbian folk, and ridiculed single-payer health care. And he’s not even taken office yet. Will the CP now tail these positions, or continue to to be the quietist self-proclaimed left in the “center-left coalition”? If it’s changing the world that’s needed, well… what the masses (all of them, not just Americans) need — if that is still relevent — is not support for Obama now. The election is over. The world needs these networks to tell him what he ought to do… not follow him around like the messiah.
Ya think he’ll reverse the Bush coup against Haiti? “Allow” Aristide to go home?
Here is Joaquin’s less breathless account of the election (which may hurt my own election-hypothesis about organizational agility at the local level, though it supports my pre-election contention that white-block voting would happen in response to Obama’s being Black).
12 November 2008, 9:05 pmStan Moore:
Years ago people used to say that if only we could get women into the Congress and ultimately to the Presidency, those maternal instincts would expand governmental compassion, eliminate war, etc.
Hillary Clinton ran for President as a warmonger deluxe, offering to blow Iran to smithereens if they looked at us crosseyed. Clearly the “change” anticipated years ago from having women in power has not been attained as predicted.
Dianne Feinstein, Jewish wife of a billionaire businessman with close trade ties to China, favors most favored trade status to human rights sanctions and has no problem with Israeli crimes against humanity in Palestine. Yet, a man named Kucinich proved that you can have a set of testacles and some testosterone and still be a fighter for peace and for justice.
Alice Walker was interviewed on the radio yesterday and already backtracked on Obama expectations for change, saying he was a symbol of change, but the real change needed to be brought about by the people.
But as I see it, Obama was the beneficiary of an already-changed nation. His election was not proof that he had changed the nation, but that the nation had changed and was ready to put the first black politician into the presidency. But the nation was not ready to put Cynthia Mc Kinney in office, and the real question now is how much change will Obama be willing to fight for once he is inaugurated.
Obama was a master at getting elected. I think his enthusiastic supporters were counting on systemic change FROM him, and not change FOR him. Obama said “Yes, we can!”. The people did their part of the “we” equation. Now it is Obama’s turn to do his part of effecting change as president and not as candidate.
12 November 2008, 9:53 pmStan Moore:
reference link:
http://patriotsquestion911.com/Article%20Military%20Officers%20Challenge%20911.pdf
Regarding the possibility of 9/11 as an inside job, I can absolutely understand why Americans would not want to contemplate such a matter. But the evidence and the seriousness of the matter scream for resolution, which was not provided by the “official investigation” which was performed by government hacks like Phillip Zelikow and Thomas Keane, Lee Hamilton, and others.
Here is a link to a compilation of testimonies of 25 professional military personnel, most of long-time service and impeccable credentials for intellect, integrity, and honesty. These persons have investigated 9/11 and have questions about what happened, but no doubt at all that the official story is false and even impossible in important ways.
Most of all notice the concerns of these patriotic American military men over the meaning of this event and the coverup on American democracy. Notice the concerns of Shelton Lankford, for instance on the serious threat to what he called “the American experiment”.
This is truly scary stuff! And with regard to subsequent American and world history, it means everything, in my opinion.
the website at http://patriotsquestion911.com contains more testimonies from military people, engineers, architects, intelligence agents, law enforcement people, and others.
Stan Moore
13 November 2008, 12:31 amPetaluma, CA
Samuel Ndegwa:
Stan,
I have been following your thread/thoughts for a while and they are stimulating. Having observed the way people live in America, and how the rest of the world want to emulate lifestyles here, it seems to me what we may need is some “epistemic” shift. I will give you an example, much of what is assumed to be known is based on Aristotelian logic. So, European and American civilization is based on the assumption that the way we use science, the way we relate to each other, in fact how we “discover” and “use” knowledge is correct and ideal. We can only trace the basis for this knowledge to about 10.000 years ago. Just because that is the only way of knowing we know does not mean it is the only one. It seems to me that we have overvalued the usefulness of the knowledge and not looked harder at possible “other” ways of knowing that might help us figure out issues such as population control, environmental conservation, our relationship with extractive resources and other life forms, energy and how to use it and religion among others.
What do you think?
13 November 2008, 1:08 amStan Moore:
reply to Samuel Ndegwa –
Dear Samuel –
I think you have raised a very important point. But it is very complicated. I have seen photos of Amazonian forest dwellers who received high tech “gifts” such as computers and gps instruments and who readily saw the benefit and value of the technology without knowing that the cumulative effect of technology probably would result in the destruction of their forest homes rather than the preservation of them.
When trappers and traders encountered American Indians, the Indians immediately saw the benefit of steel knives and pots for boiling water, the decorative beauty of glass beads, the novelty of brass falconers bells, etc. The Indians instituted trade, invited more and more white people into their living domain, and eventually got pushed completely off their own land and in some cases became victims of genocide.
In short, there seems to be something intrinsic to humans at the species level that leads us to danger from curiosity and greed, no matter what the cultural setting. If one culture does not thrive on greed and technology, but is rooted on ecological relationships and sustainability, it eventually is dominated and expelled from its setting by other cultures that attain power and influence from Aristotlian thinking.
Yet, now we have attempts to reverse the Aristotlian mindset in recognition of its reckless destructiveness. Some cultures are taught to think muligenerationally over long periods of time because they have long histories and institutional memory that sees value in such.
Derrick Jensen in an American author who is currently calling for deliberate deconstruction of our culture in order to save human and non-human life on the planet.
Daniel Quinn wrote a neat book called “Ishmael” which distinguished between the “takers” and the “leavers” within humanity and compared the civilization of the past ten thousand years to an airplane that barely got off the ground and which must crash because it is not airworthy; but the biggest tragedy is that the passengers have not figured out that their vehicle cannot fly much longer and think they are safe.
Jared Diamond, a geographer from UCLA was asked by a native of Papua New Guinea why his culture had so much “cargo” (possessions) while the indigenous had so few. Jared Diamond went on to write “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” describing how civilizations attain power and how they then collapse and fall into the dustbins of history.
The issue of greatest importance in this regard today, in my view, is that the colonization of Planet Earth by the human species is essentially complete now. We are depauperizing the planet in almost incomprehensible ways, making life as humans experienced even a hundred years ago a non-reality for the foreseeable future. Americans see a herd of ten deer and think they are seeing the grandeur of nature, but what exists here now in terms of birdlife, fish, game, etc is a pitifully small remnant of what existed before. Our topsoil has been wasted, our waters polluted, the climate heated up, the petroleum pumped out and the issue now is can our civilization survive at all.
Sam, yes, the thinking that led us to this point was flawed and harmful. It continues to be such. And yet Barack Obama stressed in his first press conference his primary goal of yet more economic growth. That is his priority, even though it is the worst objective he could shoot for.
McCain had it completely wrong about wealth distribution, and if Barack Obama wanted to save the country and heal the planet he would be working hard on collaborative solutions using sharing and downsizing American lifestyles and comsumption.
In short, we see the problem, but it is very questionable if we will fix it. I tend to think that the human population of Planet Earth will crash with huge amounts of suffering till an equilibrium is reached with planetary sustainability.
Then, a new start will take place, with the likelihood that our flawed genetics will restart the same destructive process all over again. I don’t expect to be here by that time.
Meanwhile, I believe that individuals should seek to do right and good, even if it does not change the world adequately. Sometimes the best and only thing we can do is to try, knowing we will fail…
Stan Moore
13 November 2008, 10:41 amPetaluma, CA
charles:
Obama was a master at getting elected. I think his enthusiastic supporters were counting on systemic change FROM him, and not change FOR him. Obama said “Yes, we can!”. The people did their part of the “we” equation. Now it is Obama’s turn to do his part of effecting change as president and not as candidate.
^^^^
Obama emphatically , repeatedly and correctly said during the campaign that change comes from the bottom up , not from the top down, and change come to Washington , not from Washington. He doesn’t have a big man theory of history. Change can only be made by masses. As President he can prevent the thwarting of the People’s will.
13 November 2008, 12:50 pmLegume Sam:
First, let’s dispense with the 9/11/01 questions, shall we?
We need not imagine that the hijackings of 9/11/01 were an “inside job” to accuse the Bush administration of willful negligence in the events of that day. And we need not imagine that history is the product of “conspiracy theory” in order to see how the events of that day propped up an Administration whose claim to power rested upon a Supreme Court decision and whose justification for various security decisions (e.g. letting the bin Ladens leave the country on a day when every plane in the US was grounded without so much as an FBI question, not to mention Dick Cheney’s war on the world) rests upon its “being in charge” on 9/11/01.
As Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed pointed out in his books, the idea that the 90-minute collapse of NORAD was a “routine fuck-up” does not hold water in light of its past record of efficiency, and the refusal of the official commission to investigate this matter (or, for that matter, the Armed Forces’ war games schedule on that day) only compounds the problem. And, yes, the Air Force was supposed to shoot down the planes before they collided with the towers, before thousands were to die. The engineering problem with the actual collapse of the WTC towers, the Administration’s interference with FBI investigations pre-9/11/0, and the “war” against Osama bin Laden (a man hooked to a dialysis machine who was visited in the hospital by US intelligence in the summer of 2001) were other matters entirely.
For the record, I have no idea what actually happened, nor do I care to speculate. One can see, however, that on some level Bush wanted (and allowed) the events of 9/11/01 to happen, because they rescued his Administration and his agenda from pariah status and granted him re-election chances. The Bush years, as Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo pointed out in Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire, were a bit of nostalgia for the McKinley Presidency, one last fling with the age of the robber barons before the whole virtual economy was to collapse this year. One can see that the elites desperately wanted this fling, given the immense amount of trouble they underwent in order to put Bush in power and to keep him there. As Oliver Stone doubtless observed (I haven’t seen his movie but I have read the reviews), W. is not naturally Presidential material.
Now, as for the Obama campaign, one must start by reflecting upon the fact that one must at least have the potential to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign monies, observable beforehand, in order to be considered (by the elites, of course) as a viable Presidential candidate. Obama’s rise through the money machines is, of course, a meaningful event, in light of his ancestry and skin color. Nevertheless, Obama is clearly encased in a “team,” many of whose members are responsible for the ongoing disaster which is neoliberal governance. Watch to see if Robert Rubin gets a position with the new Administration.
As for the Obama realignment, DailyKos.com put on a map showing how the only part of the country that was becoming more Republican was Appalachia. Minor shifts can account for his 2008 improvement over Kerry’s 2004 performance. This isn’t a revolution, though it is a significant change.
And as for localization, well, okay, but it’s important to recognize that with the “globalization” that accompanied the expansion of the capitalist system in the current era also came a “globalization” of humanistic values which we would do best to keep. On-the-ground facts are a matter of historical accretion before they become objects of systems analysis.
13 November 2008, 3:34 pmStan Moore:
I am not sure I agree with Charles on change and the power of the presidency.
The masses of Americans did not want to enter World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured the Japanese through embargos of raw materials to enter the war, and I believe the evidence that shows that FDR had access to top-secret military intelligence that read all military communications of the Japanese, and thus FDR was completely aware of the planned Pearl Harbor attack in all its details, and he allowed it to happen because he wanted to put American in that war.
I don’t recall the specifics of American history, but my guess is that the masses of Americans were not clamoring for an end to slavery when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It was an act of leadership on his part that ultimately cost him his life.
The majority of Americans for several years have wanted the Iraq War ended, and the president has ignored them. Even worse in Europe, where higher percentages opposed the invasion of Iraq from Day One and the American president urged foreign “democratic” governments to ignore the will of up to 90% of their people and prosecute the war.
I don’t think that most Obama supporters elected him with the expectation that they would have to pressure him into looking out for their interests, though it is certainly highly possible that Obama in effect told them exactly that.
One of the fascinating aspects of this situation in my mind relates to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he yearned for the day when people would be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
It seems to me that Obama has been judged favorably by the masses based on the color of his skin and by the tone of his rhetoric without his even being inaugurated. This seems to me to be an outright contradiction of the standard proposed by MLK. I am learning more about Obama’s rhetoric and the understanding of his character can only be revealed with time and with his record of achievement, non-achievement, and attempted achievement. MLK himself said he did not expect to get to the “promised land” but he fought for it and died for it. What will Obama do? He has awesome power as president, including the power of the Bully Pulpit. When Obama stands at the bully pulpit and discusses matters of empire, such as the view of Iran, will he be more like Martin Luther King or Dick Cheney? I await the answer to this question and others like it.
Stan Moore
13 November 2008, 8:48 pmPetaluma, CA